Poverty & Pollution

This paper explores ethical implications of businesses polluting the environment in third-world countries. It provides potential reasons why businesses would choose to disregard any standards of pollution control when conducting operations in a third-world country. Through assessing connections between economic development and environmental pollution this paper explores the famous notion that “pollution is the price of progress”. This paper argues that regardless of their country of residence, human beings have a right for a livable environment and it is the task of wealthy nations to help poor nations develop greener industries and sources of energy. Finally, the paper outlines a plan for uniform global pollution standards. When businesses choose to pollute the environment of third-world countries where they conduct operations, they fail to embrace multiple ethical issues that arise from such stance of affairs. First of all, such companies fail to recognize that by polluting the environment of poor countries (such as many countries in Latin America or Africa that have only recently embraced the path to economic development) they promote further exploitation of the poor nations by the wealthy world. By recognizing the necessity of pollution and through dumping waste in third-world countries, such companies subscribe to the doctrine of continuous exploitation of the variety of resources that have long been offered to the capitalist world by former colonies and currently independent nations. Secondly, when businesses pollute the environment of less-developed countries they support the global attitude of consumerism shaped in the West. This set of consumerist beliefs encourages wasteful extraction of natural resources as well as senseless use of materials, food and water. Finally, through dumping industrial waste in third-world countries, companies that choose to do so proclaim inequality that postulates itself in unequal right for a waste-free environment. The latter, being protected by multiple laws, regulations and recommendations, seems to be of higher value to developed nations than to those that are struggling through poverty, malnutrition and lack of well-established solid institutions that in well-developed economies serve, among many other functions, to protect the environment and internalize externalities produced by the market economy. In their book “Why nations fail?” Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) emphasize that the primary reason why a nation fails to develop its economy and earn world-wide recognition as a leader is lack of proper institutions that would design and provide sound incentives for the economy to develop. Such institutions exist in the developed Western economies; when companies choose to create negative externalities by their primary activities, laws force them to bear high costs of these externalities so that they are not borne by the general public and the common folk. However, less-developed nations cannot boast having such institutions. In other words, there is no clearly proclaimed trade-off between income of citizens and environmental pollution. Indeed, some countries are not ruled in the best interest of their people. Thus, companies do not have to pay such high price for polluting the environment. In the internal memo Summers (2000) states that third-world nations should be polluted …